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Topic: Playstation 3 through LinuxMCE (Read 3389 times)

I am new to LinuxMCE (you can probably tell by the question I am about to ask.) and would like to ask a question.

Has anyone had the idea to have a Playstation 3 hooked up to the LinuxMCE as an input device (not a media director). Where you would be able to play games on a different TV as long as you are able to have the controller reach the distance. I understand their might be lantancy with this but just thought I would ask the question to see if it might be possible.

I am also look at it to play Blu-ray DVD's and would like to know if that is possible as of yet or we are still waiting on hardware driver support. Thank you for your time and have a great day!

Bummer, kinda thought that would be the answer to that question. What about the other question I had regarding sending Playstation video to TV's with the LinuxMCE system? I would like full HD if that is possible. Thank you for answering so far

Cool, could you suggest a capture card that would be able to perform this capability? I would like to have the full support of the 1080p. I have an nvidia card which I was reading the linux drivers 180+ supports HDCP and all that jazz but I am not sure if LinuxMCE would support that. What would be the best course of action in this regard. Keep in mind the ps3 if you are not sure can do 1080i as well.

Also one other question. I have a Comcast digital box that I would like to do the some thing with. In your recommendation please consider this as well.

This would never work even if you got all compatible hardware. Capture devices have to buffer the stream in order to do compression, which usually cases a dealy on the order of 2 seconds or so. Plus whatever delay is introduced by network and disk ring buffers and display decoding. Would a game be playable if there was several seconds of delay between you pessing a button and seeing a reaction on the screen?However you can use lmce to control hdmi switchboxes to route the signal directly to wherever it needs to go.

the Hauppauge HD-PVR, is a component based capture device, on which driver support is pending, but it can only support 720p and 1080i signals over YbPbPr cabling.

-Thom

Taking the PS3 out of the picture and just talking 1080p. I was looking around and there are products out there that would be able to capture the signal. And then Nvidia cards would be able to display that signal. I am a little confused as to why you said ANY OS would not be possible. Could you please elaborate?

A video card/chipset such as the nVidias, take a digital frame buffer representation of a screen image from RAM and convert it to electrical signals output on a port, to drive a display of some kind.

A capture card does the opposite - takes the electrical signals that would ordinarily be used to drive a display of some kind, and construct a digital representation of the image in memory (usually performing some compression at the same time)

So talking about whether a particular nVidia chipset can "display a signal" is meaningless. Video chipsets do not take "signals", they only read from a RAM video buffer (where the contents of that video buffer came from is a different story, but is completely irrelevant to the video chipset)

merkur2k is right, the delay introduced by capturing and compressing a video signal would make a game unplayable. But a TV stream, that's fine and normal practice, not just with LMCE, as it really doesn't matter if the stream is delayed by a few seconds.

I understand the part about the game being unplayable. What I am talking about is right now vista can take a signal from a video capture card and then display with a video card ( nvidia as this is the only video cars that supports 1080p hdcp) what I am looking for is if I can do the same thing. Take a 1080p signal and then send it back out of the computer with the video card. Per hdcp the display, video card, and capture card on the computer needs to be able to support the hdpc connection. So with that being said what I would like to do is be able to hook a 1080p conection to my computer and then with a video card that supports it display that same signal on my HD tv. Is that possible?

Whichever way you look at it, the signal that comes out of the video card isn't the same signal as went into the capture card, as described above - it enters the digital domain at some point, otherwise you might as well just connect the source directly to the display!

That being said - HDCP complicates matters significantly. I need you to link me to the hardware you are talking about so that I can see exactly what it is that it is doing.

There are 2 possibilities - either the capture and display hardware are directly coupled so that the HDCP License Agreement is satisfied, thus rendering the hardware useless to us, as it will not be possible to get in between the stream to use it (for directing to another MD, recording to HDD, etc); or they have hacked the HDCP encryption to decouple the capture and display endpoints, and are about to get their arses sued off by Intel! I rather suspect the former.

The whole point of HDCP is to secure the channel between the source hardware and the display hardware, making it impossible to intercept the stream and redirect to, say, a recording device. You can of course hack this protection, but anybody who did this in hardware would be rendering themselves liable. This is probably what Thom was referring to.

I suppose it would be possible to "capture" the HDCP stream in raw format just by copying the stream, sending the data (bidirectional) over a TCP connection, then piping the digital stream directly out the HDMI port on the other end - thus allowing the source and display devices to negotiate a valid HDCP connection. However, this still means the signal enters the digital domain, and so renders it particularly vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. I haven't read the HDCP License Agreement, but I would think that Intel probably explicitly procludes that for this very reason - there is no advantage to them in allowing a manufacturer to do that, and plenty of disadvantages. Directly coupling at the hardware layer inside a single PC avoids the man-in-the-middle issue, but also renders it useless to us.

Even if that was allowed, you need to understand that a 1080p HDMI/HDCP stream is raw and uncompressed, and so is approximately 1.5Gb/s, which also renders it useless to us as it is far to high to be practical for piping across a network or storing on disk (note it is encrypted, so cannot be compressed even if you had hardware fast enough)

My apologies, I read the information wrong. These devices support Blu-ray drives inside the PC and display through the video card which is HDCP compliant but there are no capture cards that are able to capture HDCP. There are cards out there that will capture 1080p HDMI but not a signal that has HDCP. So if there are any HDCP signals it will not work. That is a bummer as I was hoping to be able to play HDCP related DVD's and Blu-Ray with my PC that doesn't have an HD/Blu-ray player installed in it). I guess I will just have to switch inputs when I need to do that.

There are devices that can capture HD content from component video, but they do not yet work in linux.If you want to try to do something about the HDCP issue, write letters to your representatives in the government and explain how you are not happy that laws you did not vote on are trumping your fair use rights.

LMCE is more than capable of controlling external devices over IR, RS232, or other serial communications. Setup Wizard takes care of all the complexity for you - you just tell it what things you have and what they are connected to and, taaa-daaa - A/V pipes are created along with scenarios to switch to your devices. I use this feature all the time to use the Wii, the CD changer, and the live cable box - none of which are connected to LMCE computers at all, except by IR via USB-UIRT.

If you want to get really tricky, you can connect the output of your device directly to your TV and another lower-quality output to LMCE. Then when you activate the on-screen menu, you still see the picture, but maybe with the expected 1-3 second lag. There's a post on the form by Tschak and I believe there is a wiki article all about how this works - I don't have a need for this feature, so I don't use it right now.